As we prepare to close out 2018 and reflect upon the past year, it’s overwhelming to think about the countless crises that have erupted and disrupted communities around the country, including the growing incidence of extreme climate events, mounting wealth and income inequality, increasing urban displacement, gentrification, and families separated at the border. The rising tide of crises demonstrates the need for massive and systemic change.
Earlier this year, NPQ published an interview with Malik Yakini of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, who posits, “The flaw is the idea that the earth is a commodity, and what we need is more production, more extraction. I think a new way of looking at our relationship to the earth is required.” Yakini later asserts, “Social movements become points of leverage—for example, the pushback against police killings. People within philanthropy are starting to see how oppression is racialized in the United States—how it connects to wealth and lack thereof. It activates people to push a bigger analysis of society—not just what we don’t want, but what we do want: policing justice, a new relationship to the economy.”
The idea that Earth is a commodity, as are certain people living on it, is expressed through the accumulation of wealth derived from extractive and exploitative practices such as the theft of Indigenous land, the genocide of Indigenous people, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of African people, and the systemic undervaluing of “women’s work.” Despite the gravity of these complex and intertwined systems of oppression, many social change endeavors have historically been based on the premise that through incremental steps, power could be built to move our society toward greater equality.
[For more on this story by DANA KAWAOKA-CHEN, go to https://nonprofitquarterly.org...mp;mc_eid=766815b376]
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